Fascinating San Francisco eBook

San Francisco shows a market as complete and original
in styles as any city in the country. The excessive
seasonal changes demanded in the East are not needed
here. San Francisco is essentially an out-of-door
city, with three hundred odd days of clement weather,
made for the display of light raiment, whether it
be organdie dresses, sports togs or afternoon frocks.
Women of the city insist on being modish, however,
so they wear furs with the airiest of apparel on the
warmest days, contradictory but vivacious apparitions.
Even the Chinese girls ape their Western sisters and
appear in brocaded mandarins with fur neck pieces.

The dash of San Francisco women on the street, as
well as in the hotels and cafes, is not a legend.
You may read about it in Hergesheimer’s iridescent
detail, but seeing is believing.

The art shops and the book shops of San Francisco
evoke the admiration of every visitor. The art
shops, on Post, Sutter and adjacent streets, close
to Union Square, with their own galleries of paintings,
bronzes and marbles, have showrooms that are more
like museums than commercial establishments.
The book shops are in this same neighborhood.
They are well worth visiting, several of the dealers
being publishers of the works of California authors.

Chinatown and Foreign Colonies

From its beginning as a Spanish trading post to the
present time there has always been something essentially
foreign about San Francisco. Always there have
been foreign elements, with well-marked colonies,
districts or haunts.

To visitors Chinatown appears to exercise the greatest
appeal among the foreign colonies. The Latin
Quarter, the Spanish and Mexican districts out toward
the end of Powell street at the Bay, the Japanese streets
east of Fillmore, and the Greek settlement centering
around Third and Folsom are all, however, highly expressive
of their habitants.

With its pagoda-like roofs, its bazaars, its restaurants
of amazing orchestration and stranger East-West decoration,
it is easy to. understand why Chinatown sways the
imagination of wayfarers in San Francisco. Every
street and alley in it is obviously exotic. Life
appears here like a festival, and both the eye and
the ear are beguiled by fantastic nuances.

Silks, ivories, porcelains and bronzes peer from the
shop windows at hesitant purchasers like the articles
of virtu flung before the bewildered gaze of readers
by Balzac in his Wild Ass’s Skin.

You are diverted by the bizarre on all sides, Grant
avenue, the main artery of Chinatown, stretching before
you in a many-hued arabesque of shop fronts, no two
quite alike in tone or in the stuff they have to sell.